Search Method of Robust Gate Driving Vectors for Digital Gate Drivers With Low Test Cost Against Load Current and Temperature Variations in IGBTs

Abstract

A digital gate driver with active gate driving is effective in solving the trade-off between switching loss and current/voltage overshoot of power devices. However, the optimum gate driving vector (GV) for a digital gate driver is temperature- and load current-dependent. When an optimum GV at a particular operating condition is reused to another, the switching performance sometimes becomes worse than the conventional gate drive [17]. Therefore, robust gate driving vectors (RGV) against temperature and load current variation are required [18]. Nevertheless, the test cost of searching for an RGV is very high. In order to reduce the test cost, search methods of RGV with fewer required measurements are proposed in this work. Single-step GV and stop-and-go GV are selected as the type of RGV for turn-on and turn-off, respectively. Compared with the conventional search method of RGV in [18] and [20], the proposed search method can reduce the measurement time by 99 % and 92 %, respectively. Furthermore, when the RGV and the optimum GV at a single condition are reused to other operating conditions, the maximum overall <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">f</i> <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OBJ</sub> of RGV is lower than that of the single condition optimum GV, which shows that the searched RGV has better robustness.